This School Fire Drill Is Anything But Routine

Fire drills have never been so...romantic? Ohio firefighter Justin Deierling found a creative way to pop the question to his girlfriend last Wednesday, when he surprised her by proposing during what appeared to be a routine fire drill.
Megan Zahorec, a counselor at Greentown Intermediate School in North Canton, Ohio, didn't expect to exit the school to find a banner on the side of Deierling's fire truck reading "Miss Z - Will You Marry Me?"

"[The kids] saw the sign before she did and they went wild," Deierling told ABC. Zahorec, who was in charge of the drill, was too focused on counting kids to notice the real reason her boyfriend was present.

"I was just like, 'Oh my gosh, no way,'" she said of seeing the banner, which she finally noticed after a bevy of screaming kids gave it away. "I was completely shocked. I felt like I'm going to pass out."

Deierling told the Huffington Post that he met Zahorec six months ago, when she volunteered at the fire station. "We passed out water to kids in a walk-a-thon. I knew instantly that she was someone special by the way that she interacted with the kids. I wanted to incorporate how we met and the kids, who she adores, into the proposal."

Adam Deierling, Justin's brother, filmed the proposal. He told Today.com that his brother had been planning it for two weeks, and told only him and a few other people at the school and the firehouse.

"Everyone went nuts when they revealed the sign and Justin took a knee," he told HuffPost Weddings. "It was all very exciting."

Zahorec wasn't the only one getting a ring during the fire drill. According to Fox, Deierling and his fellow firefighters handed out around 600 ring pops to kids after Zahorec said "yes."

While the couple have yet to set a concrete wedding date, her students are already well into the planning stages. "They want me to get married in the gym and they want to be my flower girls and ring bearers," she told ABC. "Or if the weather's nice, they said maybe I should do it on the field."